Findings

Back in the USA, my wife and I were driving to my stepfather's house, and we saw some boxes of books out on the curb. I pulled over and we scavenged some. A year later, one night in Vienna at about one in the morning, I started looking at one of the books, In America by Susan Sontag, and I found that Sontag had autographed it. The other morning I was sitting in front of the classroom wearing my new green suit and I noticed that a black human hair had been deliberately sewn into the sleeve near the buttons. Carefully, I pulled it out. It was about 20 cm long. Some worker saying hi from China. At a used bookstore I bought an English language textbook published in Dresden in 1932. It was full of sentences like "Have you ever ridden in an airship?" As I was leafing through it, I found a page of sentences written by some student in 1945; and then two dried, flattened edelweiss flowers fell out. I had never seen them before, but I knew what they were right away because they were shaped like the silver edelweiss pins on felt hats from the Alps. In real life they looked like little fuzzy white starfish on stems. My first edelweiss flowers; they're lying on my bookshelf now.